On Monday (9/21) I will be down in Orlando at the OTTC conference talking about application and hardware virtualization in the ECM environment! If you are part of the OnBase community attending the conference, would love to see you at the virtualization sessions, or stop by at the Expert Stations and say hello!
In these days of readily available virtualization technology, I like to install new operating systems in virtual machines before I commit it to my machine. I do this all the time with Linux and Windows. So, with the release of Snow Leopard, I decided to give it a shot, and I thought VMware Fusion supported it out of the box. But, I mistakenly missed the keyword Server. Now, we’ve covered this before for the Mac Test Lab, but I found another, more permanent solution here.
The method linked to above actually modifies the darwin.iso image that comes with Fusion so that it looks for SystemVersion.plist instead of ServerVersion.plist.
I would consider this a better solution than what was mentioned in the Mac Test Lab post simply because it’s a one-time deal. You will likely have to redo it every time you reinstall VMware Fusion, but it will work all the time, for both Client AND Server install disks.
Now, If only I could get sound to work in Snow Leopard in VMware Fusion. Other than sound, everything else seems to be working pretty well.
In addition to having a name that doesn’t fit nicely in the context of a TLA (Three Letter Acronym), there are some other potential frusterations that you may run into during the install of Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 if you don’t do some upfront planning.
I will start of by disclaiming that this article is composed completely off my own experience and research with the product as I’m just starting into the Hyper-V realm. If anyone has any other thoughts or knows differently, please feel free to comment.
The System Center interface is notably, in my opinion, one of the foremost selling points for Microsoft’s virtualization platform. In addition to a familiar, intuitive interface for managing your Hyper-V virtual machines in Virtual Machine Manager, you can also connect to ESX Virtual Center and manage your ESX farm from the same interface. Add SSOM and you can manage your physical machines (if anyone still has any of those laying around). All-in-all Microsoft already has a solid and very powerful systems management platform in the System Center product line, and Virtual Machine Manager fits right in and doesn’t disappoint. Read the rest of this entry »
A few days ago, Microsoft submitted 20,000 lines of code to the Linux Kernel. This code is three device drivers that will make it more possible for Linux to run smoothly in a Hyper-V virtual machine! This is really out of the ordinary. It seems Microsoft is realizing that running Linux is desirable as a Guest OS, but perhaps only to stay in the virtualization market. Previously, there was limited success getting Linux (I think I tried Ubuntu Linux) to boot in Hyper-V (at least when I tried it).
To see the Linux Communities stance on this code, check out this article.
Matt Asay just posted an interesting article about how virtualization products such as Microsoft’s Hyper-V could potentially make VMware turn out like Novell. His article has a point. While VMware is widely known as one of the best virtualization products out there, it could change in the future because of products like Hyper-V, and it’s not because Hyper-V is a better product; It’s because companies will often go for products that are “good enough” for their purpose.
If a company simply wants to run a few virtualized machines to cut down a little bit on costs, they may not be interested in some of the high-end features VMware’s products offer. Or if they are interested in them, they may decide it isn’t absolutely necessary in the end.
This is not to say it is all over, though. And VMware has already taken some steps to combat their competition. And what it all comes down to is that VMware’s core business is in virtualization, while other companies just have virtualization products as a complement to their existing products and can therefore afford to have lower pricing.
Definitely check this article out.
Sun has just released an update version to their free, open source desktop virtualization client, VirtualBox. They are saying the major feature is that they now provide support for SMP (multiple CPUs) for their virtual guests! In addition to that, they have improved 3D support (not that it was too shabby before).
Also, remember that this is available for download on all major OSes (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and even Solaris).
For being a free virtualizer, VirtualBox is definitely some good competition for products like VMware Workstation/Fusion and Parallels. It doesn’t seem to support 64-bit guests yet, though.
Check out the full Changelog and try it out! Let us know what you think!
Edit: stu pointed out that 64-bit guests are in fact supported, but you have to have VT/AMD-V support on your CPU. Most modern systems have this these days, however the desktop I used when I tried it on did not. This was my mistake for assuming it wasn’t supported.
Before we begin, I would like to preface this blog post: The steps and topics contained in this post are purely theoretical and are meant to appeal to academia only. The staff at VMHero assumes no liability for any infringement which may occur as a result of following any of the steps below. We do not encourage piracy, and publish this information only as a theoretical possibility.
Many of you will know that both Apple and VMware support virtualizing OS X Leopard/Snow Leopard Server for testing environments. Some of you will also know that there are ways of fooling Fusion into thinking that a VM running OS X Leopard client is really a Leopard server.
However, there is an issue with virtualizing OS X 10.4, Tiger. Installing the Tiger OS in the traditional sense of mounting an ISO or using the physical installation media will not work. In our tests, no matter what hacks or modifications we made to our virtual machine, we could not get the OS to install. At the time, we were testing for an issue whereby using a hacked ISO from the Internet was not an option.